Mom’s. Pies.

My Mom used to make the best pies of any I’ve had before or since. Lemon meringue was one brother’s favorite. I liked her cherry pies, and had the lump to show for it one day when I fell off the top of a ladder, picking cherries from the tree in our back yard.

At Thanksgiving, she made pumpkin and mince meat. Our local Safeway, the only place we found mincemeat, says they sell fewer and fewer jars every year. I suppose it once really was made of meat, but now is apples, raisins, and spices.

Making pie filling is pretty straightforward. Just follow the recipe. But, pie crusts. My Mom made the flakiest, tenderest pie crusts. And, I’ve never been able to duplicate them. The frozen ones come close, so I finally gave up in favor of buying something that was no worse than what I could make.

By the time I realized how uniquely-wonderful my Mom’s pie crusts were, it had been years since she’d made pies. I asked her to show me how she’d done it and she waved me off with, “Oh, it’s easy. Just mix everything together. Form it into a ball. Roll it out. Don’t work it too hard. It’s easy.”

Well, for her, maybe. She’d done it for years. I’d once imagined she learned the skill at her mother’s knee, but, as an adult I’d learned her mother had had even less patience than she in teaching her own children, so now suppose that she learned it at her grandmother’s knee.

This year, plunging back into the pie crust fray, I took baby steps, first buying a pie crust mix. Then, as the mix did not have enough for both a single crust pumpkin pie and a double-crust mincemeat pie, I dove into the homemade crust arena again with a recipe from The New York Times Cookbook, substituting butter for the Crisco shortening they called for and that my mother had used. The homemade crust was better than the grocery-store mix. But, still not as flaky and tender as Mom’s. I miss her still.

Hope you had a family-filled Thanksgiving.

If you have a can’t fail, tenderer than anyone has ever tasted pie crust recipe or technique, please tell me.

My Mom and little sister are experts at pie crusts. Is it a Michigan skill? I can not make them and have such a complex I won’t even try anymore. My Mom and Sandy both say the key is ICED water! Now I want pie! OH and my grandmother used to make home made minced meat pie when I was a little girl and even then she used raisins. I loved it!

Minced meat pies. I made one for the first time in 30 years for Thanksgiving last year, Grandma KC. Between the required pumpkin and pecan, in a nod to my husband’s upbringing in Georgia, the minced meat had gotten lost. Memories of childhood.

I always followed a recipe in my Sunset Cookbook of Favorite Recipes for flaky pie crust (flour, salt, shortening [yes, Crisco], 1 egg, vinegar and ice water). This one always turned out well. A few years ago, I read something Nora Ephron wrote: There is just no reason anymore to make pie crust from scratch!! She may have a point–but it’s nice to know you could do it if you wanted to. Thanks for sharing your story!